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воскресенье, 22 октября 2023 г.

How to create and structure a social media campaign plan, step-by-step

To make sure your social media campaign is as successful as possible, follow our 7 steps to plan and structure your social campaigns

If you have an upcoming marketing campaign for a new product feature, or a holiday promotion that you want to capitalize on, or maybe you’re releasing a brand-new product, you will want to plan a social media marketing campaign to help spread the word.

But in order to make sure your social media marketing is as successful as possible, you need to plan and strategize the campaign in advance and consider how it integrates with other campaign activity.

How to structure an integrated social media campaign plan

Ideally, the social elements of the campaign will be part of a broader marketing campaign plan - our companion post and members' marketing campaign plan template recommend you structure your campaign using these key campaign elements:

Campaign goals and tracking.
Campaign insight and targeting.
Key campaign messages and offers.
Campaign media plan and budget.
Campaign asset production.
Campaign execution.

Your social media campaigns should support these broader campaign goals and plans.

What is social media marketing?

Social media covers a range of digital media enabling audience participation, interaction, sharing, and creation of user-generated content (UGC) on social networks.

Social media is both an art and a science. It’s a science because you need to test and learn what is effective on different social platforms. You need to test the techniques that gain maximum engagement and amplification on each platform by using the latest organic and paid tactics.

An integrated approach towards marketing through social media tools to monitor and facilitate interaction, participation and sharing within online communities. Commercial value can be achieved by encouraging and managing both positive and negative sentiments toward your company and its brands.

What is a social media campaign strategy?

Having a social media campaign strategy aligned with your marketing campaign plan means you will action a defined and consistent process for planning and measuring your social media marketing activities, with defined objectives structured around the campaign.

When planning your social media marketing campaign strategy, we suggest you focus on one of two key social media campaign objectives:

Acquire new customers: Reach, interaction, and Community impact.
Increase sales to existing customers: Volume - Quality - Value - Cost metrics

When it comes to planning your social media strategy, we strongly recommend integrating your activities on these channels across your wider digital marketing strategies - to consolidate your efforts, avoid duplication, and align your customers' journeys to and across your site.

Planning your next social media campaign in 7 steps

At Smart Insights, we have a wealth of free and premium social media resources to help marketers, managers, and business owners elevate their digital and social media strategies using data and best practices.

In the blog below, we will explore 7 steps to creating your social media marketing campaign plan.

1. Set social media campaign goals

The first question you need to ask before a campaign is: why am I running this campaign? Answering this question will determine other steps you take during your campaign.

However, after setting these goals, you need to be specific. What level of brand awareness do you want to achieve with your campaigns? More website traffic? 2,000 new followers?

To set effective goals, they need to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).

Then, after setting your goals, it's vital to state the metrics you'll use to measure the achievement of your goals.

Make no mistake, goals are extremely important. In a CoSchedule survey, it was found that marketers who set goals were 376% more likely to report success.

Moreso, it affects every aspect of your social media campaign and helps to determine its success or failure.

2. Create buyer personas

Even if you create the best campaign content ever, if you're not targeting the right audience with your content, the campaign will likely fail. That's why you need to understand your ideal target before a campaign.

A buyer persona is a document that contains extensive details of your ideal customers. This helps you to create messages in your campaigns that can resonate with your target audience.

Some details to have in your buyer persona include:

Name
Gender
Age
Income
Location
Pain points
Favorite social media channels
Hobbies
Interests

Knowing these details will help you create messages to build trust and convince your prospects to take action.

With a tool like Facebook Audience Insights, you can input a few details and then get more details from Facebook's huge database.

3. Choose your social media channels

When running a social media campaign, you're likely to get better results when you focus on a few social media channels.

From your buyer persona, you have an idea of your ideal audience's favourite social media channels. Most times, it also depends on the type of product or service you're offering. For instance, LinkedIn is a popular network for B2B companies because many decision-makers are present on the platform.

Another way to select social media channels for your campaign is to look at past results on your website analytics. Which channels have referred more visitors to your website in the past? Which channels have brought in more leads? Are there any quick fixes you can make?

Stating these channels will affect your campaign as each channel has its best practices. Furthermore, each channel has its best content type and posting frequency. For example, what works on Twitter won’t necessarily work on Instagram and there’s a huge difference between LinkedIn and most other major social networks.

4. Use a social media calendar

When you run a social media campaign, timing is very important.

Using a social media calendar, you can outline your content from the beginning of your campaign to the end. A social media calendar is similar to a broader marketing campaign or editorial calendar, but focusing on social media activities and posts.

With a calendar in place, your team can focus on what needs to be done at a particular time. Some important tasks to have in your calendar include:

Content creation overview to track that content is created in time.
Content curation posts: when to share curated content.
Employee advocacy posts: if/when your employees share updates from their personal accounts.
Social media updates for each channel, throughout the campaign.

Your social media calendar will help ensure that you don’t miss any important steps in your strategy, while also helping you be more productive with your time.

5. Research the right tools to boost productivity

If you're running a social media campaign, you'll inevitably need tools at various stages of your campaign. You can increase your chances of success if you have a list of the tools you want to use at each stage of your social media campaign.

Here are some aspects where tools are vital:

Content creation

Content is key. There's no point defining your audience and planning your distribution if you then post the wrong thing.

Did you know, for example, in Instagram Reels gain an average engagement rate of 1.95%, which is at least double compared to the other post types on Instagram.

Therefore, you need to make sure you are creating the right type of content to delight your audience.

A popular tool you can use to create simple images and moving graphics for your campaign is Canva. It provides templates of the ideal image size for various channels. For your videos, a tool that makes the process easy is Animoto. AI is now available to support text and image creation for social media. Canva has some of the best free options Our article on Trends and Tools for AI in marketing highlights the latest developments.

Content curation

To meet your content needs on social media, you'll need more than the content you produce. Sharing relevant content from other sources will help keep your audience engaged during your campaign.

One problem though is that sourcing these pieces of content manually is ineffective and a time drain. A tool such as Quuu or Curata can find relevant content for your pages.

Social media management

Tasks such as sharing updates, scheduling updates, social listening, collaborating with team members, and others can be accomplished through a social media management tool.

Consequently, you and your team members can carry out your social tasks on a single platform and save a lot of time. Agorapulse is an effective tool for social media management that can meet your team’s needs.

Social media analytics

You need social media analytics tools from the start of your campaign; once you know what your KPIs (key performance indicators) are, use social analytics tools to track them and see how your campaign is evolving.

With this data, you can then adjust and optimize your campaign for maximized results. To help, tools like Cyfe allow you to connect your different social network analytics, along with your website traffic so that you can track all of your results in one place.

6. Carry out competitive analysis

Performing competitive analysis can help you understand what your competitors’ strategy is like as well as see what tactics and channels work for them and which don’t. This activity should inform all aspects of your integrated marketing strategy.

Some vital parts to watch from your competitors are:

Social channels used
Type of content shared
Frequency of social updates
Results generated

Apart from watching your competitors for their great practices, you also need to watch out for their mistakes. Thereby, you can exploit them to gain an edge over your competitors.

You can benchmark against competitors to learn from their approaches to inform your campaign using a tool such as RivalIQ which is a paid social media competitor analaysi service, but includes free tools for 'head-to-head analysis'. You can also use tools made available by the social networks. Linked has a useful Competitor Analytics tool and Meta business suite offers Facebook benchmarking business insights to compare competitor pages to yours.

7. Put a system in place to track performance

Tracking performance for your campaign helps to determine the success or failure of your campaigns. More so, it can provide insights to help adjust your social media strategy even while a campaign is still running.

Another benefit you get from tracking your metrics is that it can necessitate changes for your future campaigns. It's vital to note though, that the metrics you track for your campaigns will depend on your goals.

For instance, you can use UTM parameters to track traffic from your campaign to your website. A tool such as Google Analytics will provide details about traffic from a source and its behavior on your website.

Conclusion

To increase the chances of success for your social media marketing campaign, you need a robust plan in place before you start.

This starts with setting your goals. Then, you need to understand your audience, use a social content calendar to plan the actual content, use the right tools to run your campaign, and track your campaign performance throughout.

By following these steps, you’re well on your way to developing a successful social media campaign.

By Lilach Bullock

https://www.smartinsights.com/

понедельник, 28 августа 2023 г.

4 Questions to Ask to Ensure Marketing Messaging Success

How can you ensure that your marketing campaigns will be engaging, memorable, and compelling?

Assessing your messaging before going live can be essential to success.

An infographic (below) from Crystal Clear Communications explores how to test your messaging pre-launch.

Specifically, it looks at how to create a "message map" by asking four key questions:

Is the message clear?
Is the message compelling?
Is the message consistent?
Is the message concise?

https://www.marketingprofs.com/

среда, 31 мая 2023 г.

International Marketing: How to Plan and Manage Global Marketing Campaigns

Going global is the ultimate goal for every large enterprise. The chance to expand your business and sell products to customers around the world is also an opportunity to grow your revenue, bolster your brand, and solidify your company as a major player in its industry for years to come.

But it’s one thing to design and successfully launch a local marketing campaign to target customers you know in-depth. It’s quite another to plan and manage a global marketing campaign that sells your new offerings, whether they are products or services.

Today, let’s explore how you can plan a global marketing strategy that brings results and that elevates your brand to new heights of success.

What is a Global Marketing Campaign?

Put simply, a global marketing campaign is a marketing campaign intended to successfully advertise products or services to a global, rather than a local or regional, audience. Global marketing campaigns are broad, generalized, and not nearly as targeted as marketing campaigns you may have planned and launched in the past.

But don’t be fooled. International marketing strategies and their campaigns are massively complex, oftentimes by many more degrees than regional campaigns. Global marketing campaigns are also highly important for brands looking to expand to new audiences. Since global marketing can be expensive, you need to make sure your materials are designed correctly for maximum impact. Every wasted dollar hurts your finances more during a global marketing campaign compared to a regional marketing campaign.

What Are the Key Elements of an International Marketing Strategy?

Successful global marketing strategies require that you develop and implement multiple important elements. These include:

Doing a lot of research
Assembling a team made of the right people
Using the right tools, such as software platforms
Managing the project with the right approach
Tracking the right KPIs or key performance indicators
Localizing your marketing materials and assets
Standardizing and automating your processes as the campaign continues

Let’s explore some of the best ways to plan and manage a global marketing campaign.

Research, Research, Research

For starters, you must do a massive amount of market research if you hope for your campaign to be successful. Market research is important for all marketing, of course, but you can’t rely on your previous market revelations and insights to apply equally to all of your future audience members.

What works for an American audience may not work for a Chinese audience and vice versa. Therefore, plan to go back to the market research drawing board and learn:

What your target audience members want and need
The kind of language that most appeals to your target audience members around the world and that won’t insult or negatively impact other audience members
How your brand is seen or thought of in target markets around the globe

Information is power – that’s as true in marketing as it is anywhere else. Do as much market research as you can and your campaign will have much better odds of overall success.

Develop “Global” Personas

It may help to develop powerful global personas rather than smaller, regionalized personas for individual audience groups. Buyer personas can vary from country to country or even from area to area within individual countries. Cultural variations, furthermore, affect how your brand is seen by locals and the kind of messaging you need to push to inspire purchases.

Therefore, your marketing team should develop global personas with both detail and nuance. Try to segment different likely or prospective audiences, determine what will most appeal to them, and find areas of crossover. Those crossover areas – such as shared wants or needs, shared thoughts about your brand, etc. – can be areas to highlight for your global marketing materials/assets.

Assemble the Ideal International Marketing Team

No marketing campaign will be successful without the right team leading the charge. It’s important to have the right blend of people for your marketing campaign to operate as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Therefore, you need to have forward-thinking and especially agile project managers.

Global marketing campaigns are flexible by their very nature. Your team lead can’t get hung up on specific strategies or goals that may not work for multiple target markets. Instead, the ideal project manager or lead and their team members should be:

Willing to adapt to changing circumstances
Diverse – this is important so your marketing campaign takes multiple points of view and frameworks into account
Consistent and known for deliverables

Target Local Team Members

You should specifically try to target local team members at the beginning of the marketing process. Work with local team members so you can:

Find the most suitable ways for you to collaborate within a global plan
Come up with new ways to reach target audience members who may have very different cultural or economic ideas/opinions
See things from new perspectives that your core marketing team members may miss unconsciously

Use a Project Management Approach

Given the breadth and complexity of any international marketing campaign, you should look at it with a project management approach above all else. The project management approach allows you to orchestrate your program and set important deadlines right from the get-go, as well as control things like:

Team member collaborations
Dependencies across different agencies or departments
Resource allocation and data management
And more

In other words, your team leader should think of global marketing as a massive project with many moving parts… because it is! Don’t think of global marketing as any other, more basic marketing campaign. Marketing globally requires its own focus, multitasking capabilities, and cross-departmental collaboration compared to smaller, localized campaigns.

Leverage the Right Software for Global Marketing Solutions

You can’t run your global marketing campaign without the right tools on hand. You can make the job ahead much easier if you leverage appropriate software solutions, like Mediatool.

Mediatool is a comprehensive marketing campaign management platform that allows you to instantly see an overview of your international marketing strategy, plus provides real-time control for your marketing activities. With Mediatool, you’ll be able to:

Create international marketing plans in one place so all team members and external partners can see what’s going on and collaborate easily
Set budgets and KPIs
Merge marketing data into the same place for better analysis
Consolidate data in real-time and integrate marketing channels
Demonstrate the ROI your marketing campaign has provided to your business so far
Improve and optimize your marketing strategy as time goes on, leveraging the gathered data to make better decisions

Mediatool can truly bolster any international marketing effort; try it today!

Establish the Right KPIs to Track

Establishing and tracking the right key performance indicators is also important. Don’t rely on tracking generalized metrics to see whether your campaign is coming along strongly. Instead, work with regional teams and find the unique metrics that tie back to your overall marketing goals.

What may look like slow growth in one region or country could be a sign of fast growth in another. Again, this highlights how global marketing is more complex than localized marketing, and it may require a custom-tailored look at each region or unique cultural market you want to reach.

Localize Marketing Assets

Be prepared to localize many or all of your marketing assets. Localization means going beyond just translating copy, of course. It also means checking your marketing materials like CTAs/calls to action, photography, videos, and so on.

Regional cultural differences can impact how your marketing materials land for your target audiences. If you don’t localize your materials, your marketing campaign efforts, like your advertisements or social media posts, may not make the advertising splash you hope they will.

Localization takes a lot of time, but it’s well worth it in the end. Done properly, localization will allow your brand to reach a much wider audience and connect deeply with your target personas, even if they are much more numerous than before.

Standardize and Automate

Lastly, you’ll only be able to scale up your global marketing strategy and really let it take off if you standardize and automate workflows and processes. Standardization and organization allow you to boost your return on investment/ROI massively, while also allowing your marketing materials to reach as many people as possible.

For example, don’t manually read and translate every blog post or email. You can instead automate the process using digital tools and machine learning technology to maximize efficiency and productivity across the board.

Standardization and automation will enable your global marketing campaign to truly impact a worldwide audience, as well as free up your team leads for other work on the horizon.

https://cutt.ly/Nwq8TFdA

Managing International Market Research Campaigns

It is not unusual nowadays to design a market research campaign covering many countries. This isn’t unreasonable as most corporates service global markets and must understand their different needs. However, international studies bring with them a number of research implications.

Before committing to carrying out research in a dozen countries, it is worth considering why it is necessary to cover such a large number. The immediate answer may well be “because we sell in all these countries and they are all important to us for different reasons”. However, it is unlikely that all the countries will be of equal importance. Indeed, it is more than likely that just two or three countries will dominate. The question therefore should be, “which countries are crucial to the objectives of this survey and which are of peripheral interest?” It may be that a question of this kind can narrow the countries down and in so doing, will simplify the task.

When designing a multi-country study, consideration has to be given to 5 important factors:

Data collection methods. From a practical point of view, what methods of data collection can be used in the different countries? It has now become virtually impossible to carry out telephone interviews with large companies in the US if the researchers do not have access to a direct telephone number and a contact name. Even then, the use of voicemail makes telephone interviewing difficult and expensive. This has led to the domination of online panel interviews in the US. However, online panels of business-to-business respondents are often few and far between or of low quality in many countries outside the US and the more developed countries of Europe. Therefore, telephone interviews may be the most obvious and practical option. This being said, getting hold of people by telephone in certain countries, such as Japan and South Korea, is not easy because in those countries it is not normal protocol to divulge even quite ordinary insights to an unknown person at the other end of a phone line. Multi-country studies may well require different data collection methods and the different methods could require different approaches to questioning. Melding the results is something to think about before the study commences.

Questionnaire translations. Almost certainly a study involving a number of different countries will require a mix of different languages. If the questionnaire starts in English (and usually it does) then the questions must be simple and straightforward so that as little meaning as possible is lost in translation. It should not be assumed that anyone with a command of a language can act as a translator. Interviewers carrying out the foreign language questionnaires are not usually the best translators. Translations are best left to translation agencies and there are a number that specialize in market research questionnaires.

Extended timelines. Arranging the translations and having the translations checked inevitably burns up valuable time. A study planned in a single language that would take eight weeks to carry out could well require 12 weeks if it is to be conducted in multiple languages. Checking the translations and managing the quality checks on the different country studies is a painstaking process which should not be scrimped.

Inter-country comparisons. Bringing together the results from a multi-country study presents different challenges. To what extent can you compile data from different countries into one result? Equally, how comparable are the different country results? We know that certain cultures, particularly in developing countries, can be more generous in their responses than others. Normalizing data from different countries isn’t easy and it is often best to look at each country within its own country norms.

Budgets. Finally, all this comes with a cost. In the enthusiasm to carry out a multi-country study, budgets can be forgotten until the proposals roll in. The shock wave of finding out that there is a $200,000 price-tag may jolt the study back to reality and instead of research across a dozen countries, it steps back to a study of the three or four countries that really matter.

https://cutt.ly/vwq8U3df

среда, 4 января 2023 г.

How to plan a social media marketing campaign, step by step

By Lilach Bullock

To make sure your campaign is as successful as possible, you need to plan and strategize the campaign in advance.

Wondering how to plan a social media marketing campaign?

If you have a new feature coming out, a holiday that you want to capitalize on, or maybe you’re releasing a brand new product, there are always plenty of reasons to start a new campaign.

But in order to make sure your campaign is as successful as possible, you need to plan and strategize the campaign in advance.

That's why you need a data-driven marketing strategy to help shape the direction of your social media campaign to improve your chances of achieving your goals.